Google’s new Page Speed Service is one part optimization tool and one part content distribution network (CDN). Google essentially grabs your website, caches it and serves it from the company’s extensive network of servers around the world. The best part about Page Speed is its simplicity - all you need to do is point your DNS to Google’s servers. After that Google handles the rest and you don’t need to worry about minifying your JavaScript, compressing images, caching, gzipping, or any other web performance best practices.

In the doubtful case that Google is really just trying to benefit the web as a whole, I ran my site through the comparison. The results weren’t surprising. Both of my test pages increased in load time. joshuakehn.com increased 59% when “optimized” while my websocket tutorial page went up 48%.

An interesting project from Google to try and speed up the web for the entire world – for free. There are some real concerns with allowing Google to do that, but as any nerd I was more interested in how much faster they could make TBR.